The Tailor Made Path

Finding our way to authenticity

There’s a line from “Better Call Saul” that’s stuck with me: “Either you fit the jacket, or the jacket fits you.”

I spent most of my life not understanding the difference.

Growing up, I envied people who had dreams and aspirations and wondered if I would ever find mine. I just liked playing video games and going to play basketball with my friends. That was it. I spent most of adolescence waiting for some life-altering thing to walk through the door and turn me into something. It never did.

What I found instead was a slow accumulation, a life built piece by piece as I learned more about myself and what i prioritized. Some people find their calling immediately. Others grow into it, essentially becoming it. I’m the latter.

Over the course of a couple years I realized what I wanted to do, and it was in front of me the whole time, it was just so simple I never gave it any thought. Health, wellness, fitness, mindfulness.

All these things have been a constant in my life. Through meditation and reflection, seeing the patterns in my life, I was shown how important it is to be aware of the life that I’m living, not just being strung along by it.

When I gained control of it and saw that I was able to navigate life’s situations with understanding, I wanted to help other people do the same.

Before, I was chasing toxic relationships, convincing myself that “fixing” people gave me purpose.

I would adjust who I was in order to make the relationship work. Breakup after breakup, I’d come out more shattered than before. Until I turned the project inward.

In 2017, aimless and gutted after another breakup, I decided the most important thing worth working on at the moment was myself.

I had realized that you can’t help people unless they want to help themselves, and even so the concept of “saving someone” has a price. I much prefer helping through inspiration and leading by example.

In the beginning of my journey I was obsessive with my personal growth. I would read every self-help book I could find.

Beating myself up over every wasted hour. I was wearing a new jacket now, but I was still forcing myself into it, still chasing someone else’s idea of what “better” looked like. It took time to understand that self-improvement isn’t about becoming a different person. It’s about finding out who you actually are.

But knowing yourself only gets you so far. You still have to figure out how to actually live, how to earn, how to spend your days, and how to build something that feels like yours. The answer comes slowly, through trying on different fits.

I worked a lot of jobs to get through college and stay afloat - bartending, waiting tables, walking dogs, manning an elevator for a museum. What they taught me wasn’t a skill set, but a feeling. I remember standing in that elevator, pressing the same two buttons, hour after hour, doing mind-numbing work. Wearing their jacket. It was suffocating.

It took me a while, but I stopped trying to fit into other people’s structures and started building my own. Now I work on my own terms, on my own schedule. But everything falls on me, the success, the failure, the uncertainty. That’s the tradeoff, but if we’re going to struggle anyway, why not do it for something we love?

It’s scary, if I’m being honest. There are days when I wake up and the weight of it all hits me: no safety net, no guaranteed paycheck, no one to blame but myself if things fall apart. I used to worry about where money would come from or whether I’m doing enough.

But then, I remember what it felt like to wear someone else’s jacket every single day. And I will always choose that uncertainty over that suffocation.

What jackets have you been squeezing into? When have you felt most like yourself? You don’t need the answer right now.

You might still be in the wrong jacket and too scared to take it off. That’s fine. The hardest part is admitting something doesn’t fit. Once you do, the tailoring can begin.